…Because true siblings make gambling games out of their brother’s angst-ridden love lives.

My copy of Brilliant Blue finally left Japan! …Now I just have to wait like, half a month or more for it to arrive since I’m too cheap to pay for the super expedited shipping. OTL Oh yeah, and I finished Passion Pink a while ago. I just have no drive to finish the post, since I didn’t take notes during Futo’s route like I should have. I’ll get it done soon (hopefully).

Episode 11

Tsubaki has certainly changed, as you can probably tell. He’s pretty far from the idiot that was forcing himself on Ema like, half a season ago, and he’s waay more serious and mature now than I expected him to be. Out of all the siblings, he’s the one who’s changed the most at the moment. Besides him, all of the other brothers seemed to have taken a step back as well. Subaru’s off to go pursue professional basketball, so he’ll be further out of the picture, but the ones who had confessions all seem less clingy. Other than Futo, they all pretty much said that they’ll wait for her answer, which is great. Maybe her speech about wanting to become family more than anything paid off.

The romance aside though, it was great seeing all of the brothers acting like family for Ema and telling her good luck on her exams. Any and all awkwardness between Ema and the brothers at the beginning of the series is gone. She’s definitely part of the household now. Hell, even the fact that there were confessions in the past didn’t seem to make anything overly awkward here.

…And then Subaru and Natsume had to raise the tension again. So Subaru’s out, and I guess Ema’s been kissed so many times by all of the other siblings, she failed to recognize Natsume’s feelings when she was over at his place. …Or something. They never mentioned it, but the reason Natsume chose a gaming company as a career was because it had nothing to do with sports. Well, he has his feelings out there now and to be honest, his confession would probably the best out of the triplets (timing-wise) if there wasn’t the Subaru drama. Or maybe I was just impressed with the fact that he didn’t seem to mind the fact that Ema wanted to bring all of the brothers along instead of being alone with Natsume. If he cared, I’m sure they would have thrown in some kind of reaction shot with him visibly upset. Oh, and I guess we’re starting to see part of Iori’s other side too. I don’t think he and Ema have ever really had any meaningful dialogue (to be fair though, have any of the brothers?), but he’s fallen hard for her anyways it seems. Why they’re ending the series with this, I don’t know. They could have just ignored him the entire time like they’ve been doing and I don’t think anyone would have noticed.

Episode 12

Masaomi and Iori exist?! This is the biggest plot twist of BroCon, right here.

Okay, so I was wrong about them throwing Iori in at the last minute. They went back to ignoring his character and then shoving him even further out of the picture with the studying abroad thing. Which is okay since his real issues might have ruined his character, and this way, we can all just write him off as “that one mysterious guy”. Subaru has left too (but not really since he keeps coming back), and so has Kaname. It was kind of questionable before, but Kaname has definitely bro-zoned himself. However, he just seems like such a better character for it. Sure all of the other brothers seem to be respecting Ema’s wishes and have backed off a couple of steps, but Kaname took it to a whole different level, vowing to come back as only her brother. He’s not going to wait for her and secretly hope that she’ll choose him, he’s going to give up entirely for her sake. It’s weird that Hikaru has decided to join in at the absolute last possible minute, but maybe they’re hoping for a second season. Will it actually happen? Who knows. They also had him inexplicably out of drag for some reason. Never never really explained why he cross dressed in the first place, so this was probably just them going “Wait! He’s male, we swear!”

Ugh, Yusuke was just too adorable this episode. He didn’t make it in to Meiji, so he didn’t confess (unfortunately), but the fact that he cares so much about Ema (with the looking for her number before his and all the thought behind that) is just so heartwarming. And then of course, he DOES make it in, making the whole thing even better. He still hasn’t confessed yet, but maybe that’s for the best, since Ema has made it clear that she only wants to be siblings. …Unfortunately for those plans, nobody seems to have completely given up. But I guess this wouldn’t be much of a reverse harem anime if the guys didn’t all fawn over the heroine no matter what she says or does. So as I expected from the start, Ema chooses no one in the end. If you’re curious about the novels, the last I read, Ema seems to favour Natsume out of all of them (where she thinks of him differently than all of the brothers), but who knows. I can’t even remember enough of what happened in them to even tell you how closely this anime followed the plot. And as I’ve said about 960713 times already, this is extremely far from the game.

So Ema became an okay character after that whole incident where she found out that she was adopted, and I like her a lot more at the end of the series than I did at the beginning. Though that goes for the series in general. The beginning was okay, the middle was kind of painful to watch, and then these last couple of episodes were better. She even acknowledged this episode that the way she was acting (with being so accepting of everything) caused everyone even more problems. …Though I don’t know about the whole thing being about kindness. I’m sure that’s what the series intended, but from what they showed us, it looked a lot more like just plain old apathy. Oh well. The series ended off on a relatively good note, regardless. Obviously, things are far from over, but it had some sort of wrap up to what little plot this show had. Open ended conclusions in these kinds of shows often annoy me, but this was acceptable for me. …Mostly because I was expecting this anyways, but I think a lot of it also has to do with the fact that none of them really seemed to truly ‘bond’ with Ema (or at least, she wasn’t overly attached to any one person in general). They all just kind of shoved their feelings on to her, so this kind of ending feels… right, I guess.

This isn’t the best otome game adaptation I’ve ever seen, but Arcana Famiglia seems to have forever taken the spot as “the worst” for me, so in comparison, this wasn’t bad. It was way better once Ema (sort of) gained a personality. She still is deeply lacking when compared to her other versions in media, but at the end, things kind of worked out into an acceptable ending. A few of the other, more annoying, characters ‘redeemed’ themselves a bit too (mostly Kaname and Tsubaki, but they’re the only ones who had any kind of character development anyways), which helped. Maybe if they had spent more time developing the family’s characters, this could have been better, but it’s okay as it is. I guess that’s how I feel about this show overall. I just feel weirdly passive about it, without leaning either way on whether this was bad or good. I say weird, because all of my disappointment over how different this was from the games just seems to have… vanished at some point. I guess that’s better than absolutely hating it, but this probably isn’t the reaction that the production team was looking for. Oh well, I’m still excited for the Brilliant Blue at least, so this hasn’t ruined my enthusiasm for the franchise.

Plus we got a rather embarrassing so-bad-it’s-good-yet-still-terrible ED song from this. ヽ(´ー`)ﾉ

17 Responses to “Brothers Conflict – 11-12 [END]”

As an anime series, this one was way worse than Arcana Famiglia for me. From what you say about the game, I’d have to say that it really suffered in the transition from “one guy at a time dating sim” to “6 brothers competing against each other” harem anime. As a harem anime it was laughable. By the end, I was just thinking “…and ANOTHER suprise hug! Will he force a kiss on her too?” with about a 50% yes rate.

Plus, it was pretty skeevy with the “I only want to be siblings.” “Ok, I hear you, I’m not gonna give up!” Read the atmosphere, guys! It makes you look so freakin’ desperate. As usual, the only ones who weren’t completely terrible were Yuusuke and Subaru, and Subaru basically took himself out of the running. I can respect that a lot more than the triplets with their “Your feelings were communicated properly, but we’re gonna totally ignore them!”

I’m glad they didn’t try to shoehorn Iori in somewhere. 1) he sounds like a creep, 2) even if he’s a creep, he’s more complicated than a 10-minute “hey, here’s Iori!” sequence would deal with. And is Masaomi’s deal just that he doesn’t know how to deal with anyone who’s not a kid? “Have a lollipop.”

Overall, this was good for ironic laughs. Especially capped off by that horrible ED.

The anime suffers from bad directing, I wonder why they chose Jun Matsumoto to directing this since he never directing shoujo series before.

Plot-wise, the anime itself is really close to the novels. The story in episode 11 and 12 is pretty much the same to what happened on season 1 last volume novel.

About “6 brothers competing against each other”, it is actually ““8 brothers competing against each other” in season 1 novel.I guess they removed the last pair on the anime since it going to destroy someone character and it doesn’t fit the family theme which the producers are going for.

I think the end line for me with Arcana Famiglia is that I just don’t like Chiaki Kon as a director. After reading the manga for Makai Ouji, it’s safe to say that she ruined the anime for that by drawing out the really unimportant parts to a ridiculous extent and then cutting half of the plot out so that things made way less sense in the long run. Like Felicita too, the main character’s personality is rather different in the original and focuses more on his more annoying traits as opposed to having him develop at all. …So good luck with Golden Time, next season.

Well, to be fair to the triplets, that “lololol I’m not going to listen to that” reaction was the same for pretty much everyone who confessed. Futo, Hikaru joined in now, and even Subaru still seems to be going for her. I wouldn’t say that Subaru is quite out of the running yet. Really, the only one who’s completely removed himself is Kaname.

…I don’t even know about Iori. He’s just that one mysterious guy, I guess. But yeah, that’s Masaomi’s character in a nutshell.

The anime is based on the LNs, not the Otoges. The anime skipped some LN chapters, though the skipped ones aren’t really that important to the plot.

The Otoges is pretty much a complement to the LN story where the player gets to known the brothers personality better. The Otoges is also what-if situations, some events in the games doesn’t happen on the LNs.

A decade ago, I did work on the reverse of this show called… Sister Princest. At that time, there was a joke called “Brother Prince” – ie, complete gender reversal. Obviously, this is it realised into a product.

Honestly speaking, to this day, I cannot remember WHY the goddamn hell possesed me to watch the entire series. Fortunately, did not watch the DePure sequel. It kinda put me off large-harem stuff. Incest was not, is not and will not be an issue.

…Oh hey, I remember that show. They did that reverse thing during april fools where they turned this into Sisters Conflict, but yeah, I totally get what you’re saying about Sister Princess’ similarities.

Large harems get pretty ridiculous pretty quickly. I can’t even remember half of that show (…which may be a good thing), so I can’t really add much here.

This wasn’t a good show. But I’ll still miss it TT^TT Aaaaaw~ I need to find another otome game adaptation quick! Diabolik Lovers doesn’t count, I need something that’s already finished airing. I got quite addicted to the reverse harem type of shows. Now that BC is over I need some more 0-0

I remember Angelique. I saw the original Angelique series as well as the Neo Angelique. Neo Angelique was better plot-wise but Angelique had better guys in my opinion.
La Corda D’Oro was okay, but I only watched the first season, I never got in the second one much.

Ouran and Fruits are really too good to be considered simply reverse harem, but if you haven’t seen them definitely give them a try. Pretear’s also a good one. There’s also Haruka: Beyond the Streams of Time as well, though that’s pretty similar to Fushigi Yugi.

Well, the Conflict is finally over, and what did I think of it? Well, I’m actually kind of two minds about it. I truly appreciate the small but noticeable character growth of Ema. She actually admitted to her flaws of being too passive and not putting her foot down earlier. She learned that she has to be more decisive and to choose what’s best for her. In the end, she’s really made a mature and natural decision to not get in any relationship right now and to concentrate on her studies and college. Hopefully she finds that maturity that most get once the shift to college and find out that high school was not the big deal they once thought it was.

However, on the other had, I found this show to end up being a huge gigantic tease, and after all this strife and anger and conflict, they decided to leave the whole thing open-ended with no resolution except “better luck next time”? I actually feel a little let down by it. I don’t want to say that I feel as if I wasted my time, but I feel somewhere close to that. Brothers Conflict was nothing special, and honestly I was more interested in Amnesia despite its worse heroine. However, it was okay for what it was worth.

Yeah, Ema’s growth was nice. She was much better at the end of the series than she was at the beginning.

…But did you really want her to end up with any of the brothers? None of them ever really seemed like they were all that close with Ema other than kissing her or whatever. And Yusuke or someone like him would have been fine, but imagine if it was Futo. I know you never watched UtaPri, but it was more frustrating there, since Haruka and the 7 guys all had meaningful interaction that wasn’t forced.

Amnesia didn’t really have a conclusion to it either, romantically. Ukyo was the best choice hands down, but they just showed the heroine with everyone.
I’m rather used to these open ended things by now though. To the point where I expect them for every otome game turned anime that I watch.

I could still get behind Yuusuke ending up with her. I don’t think he ever tried to parlay his sibling-ness into boyfriendness. He always seemed to treat her separately: when it was sibling things, he was like a brother. Of course, he never really did anything about his feelings for her, either.

Well, I actually would have preferred her with Yusuke. I really liked him and how he looked out for her interests before his own. He never even got to really confess his feelings either, which I thought a shame since he was the one who liked her before all the others even knew her.

I really didn’t watch Amnesia for the romance, but more for what was going on with her memories and the jumping through dimensions and how she had to die in order to exit each. I also loved how psycho Ukyo shook things up from time to time, and Ukyo was best guy by far. I doubt any of these boys would be willing to die for Ema hundreds of times over and over again, and yet only wish her to be happy even if it was with someone else. I don’t care how the series ended, in my mind those two ended up together.